The Value Bridge - Practice what you preach

What you promise as an organization, you have to deliver.

That sounds obvious. Yet I regularly see a big gap between what a company says it considers important and what customers and employees notice in practice.

During a marketing audit, I don't just look at campaigns, positioning and communication. I also look at the question of whether what an organization says externally corresponds to what is happening internally.

Because if you as an organization say that you are social, human or customer-oriented, for example, but employees or customers experience something else, a reputational risk arises.

That's not always an easy message to tell a CEO.

I have experienced that such an observation was waved away: who reads about values? Or that someone responded with: values are not part of marketing or communication, are they? That's HR.

Recently, I worked with an organization of about 50 employees. In my marketing audit, number 1 was the advice to look again at the company values.

The values were listed as separate words on the website. They were once set up together with employees.

But what does a value like social or human actually mean?

This can mean something different for every employee. And if you don't discuss what behavior belongs to such a value, it remains a word.

I've seen this before. Employees are asked which values they find important. The most frequently mentioned words then become the company values. They appear on the website and in the annual report.

And with that, it seems settled.

But a value is not a value because it is on a website.

A value only acquires meaning through the behavior that goes with it.

The director of this organization was initially also on the defensive. After all, the values had been drawn up together with the staff.

But when we looked further together — now also with the quality control manager — it became clear that there was behavior in the organization that did not correspond to one of the published values.

And with that, the priority also changed.

Before we started using marketing campaigns to tell customers how well the service matched their needs, something had to be solved internally.

Because the louder you tell externally how good you are, the greater the risk that customers will see the difference between promise and reality.

And nowadays, such an experience does not always remain internal. One disappointed customer can share their experience online and reach a much larger audience.

I had put do what you promise at number 1 because I thought it would be a relatively simple advice.

That turned out to be a misconception.

It was the most important advice. But certainly not the easiest.

Because as soon as you want values to match practice, it's no longer about marketing.

Then it is about behavior, leadership and culture.

This director chose not to run away from that.

And perhaps that is ultimately the most important promise you can make as a leader:

say what you stand for — and make sure your organization acts on it.

This was an edition of The Value Bridge, a series in which I connect developments and practical observations with positioning, communication, reputation and value creation. Because value often arises in the smallest moments.